


Regarding the Lila Anon

by Sentlett



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Cause I have nothing better to do without my usual computer, Gen, Lila Rossi Bashing, Trolls are why we can't have nice things, it relates to the practice of it, kind of, lila roleplayer not welcome, metacommentary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27502324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sentlett/pseuds/Sentlett
Summary: Considering that the subgenre of Saltfics have been over run with a malicious Anon in the Miraculous fandom, harassing and trolling people maliciously, I filed an abuse report to see what could be done about them.Below is the Abuse Report I wrote, The Abuse Committee's Response and My Thoughts on it and the situation at large.Lila anon isn't welcome, and anon comments are disabled. Don't even try and sorry to the good anons for removing your voice. (Teen rating is for crude language in the last section)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 55





	Regarding the Lila Anon

_ The Report _

{Obviously I have stripped any personal data from this email and the response} <\-- Curly Brackets indicate my postcommentary to help give context/my immediate thoughts

  
The following abuse report has been sent to the Abuse team:  
URL of the page the abuse is on: https://archiveofourown.org/support   
Description of the abuse: 

  
Context:  
I am a member of the Miraculous Ladybug Fandom. Currently one of the trends is Bash fics on a character named Lila Rossi, due to the warping effect she has had on all the other character's personalities, and the general mishandling of the events she creates by the writers. In response to this, a person or group of people have taken to using an anon 'account' under the character's name to harass people who write such fics. This takes the form of comments in the character's voice which point out nonexistent problems in the various scenarios appearing in the story. Generally, this is isolated to one or two comments, and they just troll a bit. However, in some fics, the lila roleplayers (as we writers sometimes call them) have taken it to the point where they cross a line. They are a pox on a generally kind, supportive, and accepting fandom, and the issue has been going on for at least a year.

  
Question: I have been getting numerous comments from this one anon, Lila, and it has gone overboard. I allowed the first comment to stay since I understand that a portion of the fanbase like countertrolling the roleplayer a bit, and they open themselves up to that when they attempt to troll. However, they are now sending upwards of 5 comments a day to my inbox since I posted my most recent chapter 3 days ago. 

{In hindsight it was a horrible idea to allow anyone to engage them, I should have just started right off culling my comments, but I probably wouldn't have helped. And honestly this was one of the worst things that has happened to me on the internet, which I am thankful for. But still it feels horrible to know that there is someone out there who is willing to put effort into making my life feel worse.}

  
These are comments of either no substance or with insults (generally accusations of cowardice for deleting their comments) and have begun to bother me to the point where I am questioning I should discontinue writing the story, just to avoid having to deal with their comments. {No, I didn't discontinue the story, it is on unintentional hiatus until I can get my actual computer up and running again - the next two chapters are trapped on its harddrive - but I am hopeing to have it back by American Thanksgiving}

  
I have asked them to cease repeatedly, asking that if they have genuine criticisms for my fic to either use a genuine account (so that I can respond properly should they get abusive) or at least a proper username and in their own words. They have not. They are currently taunting me by leaving short messages because I stated I would be deleting their comments. I have been doing so since they are of no worth. Below is an example of this type of comment:

  
Still here, still unstoppable.  
:)

  
and another:

  
I am afraid I can't.  
Nobody can stop the Lila.

  
As you can see, there is really no point in these comments other than to harass me with an overfilling inbox. I'm just thanking my lucky stars they haven't gotten to their worst stage. There have been times where they have said that characters "deserve" to have attempted suicide on some of the darker, more mature fics that are in this category, and have said racist, homophobic, and other slurs on fics that involve such material.

{I have seen this in person and the aftermath with the responses there and the comment deleted, It isn't pretty and it isn't funny. This is the worst type of troll because they don't care if they hurt people in the process of getting their laughs. Some trolls are good for the world, just look at Anonomous in their heyday for a _good_ example of trolling, where they are using it retorically to expose hypocrisy, these trolls are there for the _lulz_ and arn't even sorry for the lives and innocents they harm along the way}

  
I have been a bit insulting to them, mainly because they have gotten overly annoying to the point where it is affecting my willingness to write. They are making a hobby I usually enjoy a thing I don't feel comfortable in. However, I previously had a hands-off approach to them and they are the ones who escalated by not ceasing their behavior when it was clear that their roleplaying wasn't wanted on my story.

{I have a fight response to verbal assault. If someone tries to use words to hurt me, I generally try to hit back logically but still cuttingly. Generally this works in person but the internet doesn't work that way. Again, to other creators, the hands-off approach doesn't work, dont' try it because it just gives the troll an open playground full of sand to throw in your eyes.}

  
I really don't want to have to disable anon commenting because a good portion of my legit commentators is anons, and I don't want to punish them for the actions of a troll, nor myself in the lowered user/work statistics. Moderating my comments wouldn't help either because I would still be notified and have to read the comments left to filter them. Considering the volume sent it would only make more work for me since I would have to allow others to appear. 

{And that is the problem, because of these trolls a large subsection of the community cannot discourse on our works, which for someone like me who is using fanfiction as a way to practice writing, is getting rid of a large amount of feedback and therefore growth. Additionally, just the fear of the troll is enough to cause us to turn off the anon comments which harms our work stats, putting us lower on searches than other fics on the site.}

Basically, I'm asking what I should do, cause this is a bad situation for the entire fandom and I don't know how we can stop it. We have tried asking nicely, we have tried to tell them to stop. I have tried removing their voice, but they haven't stopped. At this point, I kind of just want to give up, but that would be letting them win. Up to this point, I have been marking their comments as spam.

  
It is so bad that we have a collection literally called "Lila Anon Support Group". link: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/LilaAnonSupportGroup/works  
What should I do? Is there anything I can do other than what I have been doing? 

  
Thanks,  
-Pheno {This was before I changed my psud but after I recognized how cringy my previous one was}  
PS: here is a link to the fanfic I wrote that I am referring to  
https://archiveofourown.org/works/26710540/chapters/65156917  
and if you need any more examples of the comments I have all of the comment notifications in my email inbox, provide an email address and I can forward them to you.

* * *

  
_ The Response _

Hi, 

Thank you for contacting the AO3 Policy & Abuse committee. We appreciate your concerns and have reviewed your complaint regarding the anonymous comments left on your work "The Fires of a Vengeful Goddess", located at <https://archiveofourown.org/works/26710540>. 

Unfortunately, since the comments did not come from a registered user, there is little that can be done other than to delete the comments. It’s not possible to ban anonymous users, and blocking guest IPs is ineffective because many trolls use different IPs, provided by a proxy service. When we have tried implementing IP blocks in the past, we ran into issues with innocent users getting caught up in the ban. No matter how many we block, the troll can simply switch to a new service. It is also possible to create multiple disposable email addresses. We can ban actual accounts that use these sorts of addresses specifically for harassing people, but we can’t do much against trolls who use them for anon comments. 

{I can understand their thoughts here, and the fact that they have tried is commendable. However it just raises the question of why they can't allow creators to manage that themselves, for example, if comments are coming from the same ip, create a 'anon profile' for the commenter and allow people to block that ip on a fic by fic basis. More possible solutions in the last section}

However, as the creator, you have full control over the comments left on your work, and may delete them at your discretion. Anonymous comments will also have a "Spam" button; selecting this button will mark the comment as spam, remove it from your comment statistics, and hide it from view for everyone except Archive administrators. 

{The problem here is that this is reactionary, it makes it hard to prevent trolls when they can get away with it and leave the creator just trying to share their fun bash fic to pick up the pieces while trying to continue working on the fic. Cleaning up another person's mess isn't fun and it disincentivises creating fics in this subgenre when we know that we will deal with harrassment just for sharing our works, That in its own way is quashing our right to freedom of expression.}

You may wish to alter the privacy settings on your works so that they are only visible to logged-in users, or enable comment moderation, which will prevent new comments from appearing publicly on your work unless (and until) you approve them. You can also disable anonymous commenting, which ensures that only registered Archive users can comment on the work, but will still allow guest users to leave kudos. 

{I have done this, but as I said it hurts because I like comments, it means people are digesting my writing and acually having thoughts about it. I love reading the comments because seeing people enjoying my writing gives me warm fuzzies and responding to comments is almost as fun as writing the chapters that are commented on. This is just depriving me of a large piece of the enjoyment I get from writing in order to avoid potential harrassment}

If you’re not sure how to edit the privacy settings on your works, you can consult our Posting and Editing FAQ: <http://archiveofourown.org/faq/posting-and-editing#controlaccess>

Please feel free to share our advice with other users who may be experiencing the same issues. We strongly advise creators and their readers not to engage these sorts of commenters in dialogue. However polite or rational you may be, it almost always leads to escalation. 

{I suppose good advice. and this is why I am posting this, because I figure people may learn something from what I have done/experienced here.}

We hope this alleviates your concerns. If you have any questions, please feel free to reply directly to this email. 

Lydia 

AO3 Policy & Abuse

* * *

_ My Thoughts _

If there is one thing that I have learned from being on the internet most of my life it is this: The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory exists. The pleasingly acronymed GIFT is the proven fact that if you take a relatively normal person give them seemingly infinite anonimity and a microphone, you will get a Fuckwad, that is someone who spews hot garbage instead of words and lives to make other people's live miserable.

It is just human nature that hiding one's identity will make one's actions more extreme. This explains troll and anonimous gifters, white hat hackers and black hat hackers. However, it is the neccessity of the ones giving these people a possible platform to cut the malicous activity at it's knees before it can spread. This is what forms toxic fandoms, the fact that anyone can say anything and avoid capture because there is no connection to meatspace, or even your greater internet person. Even here, I am more accountable because I have an account and am posting it under it. This account is obviously attached to an email which connects to my, admittedly sparse, internet presence. I have cut out my email from my public bio, if only to stop randos from emailing me, but if someone where to report me for legitamate abuse of the terms and servaces of this site I would be held accountable if only by the death of my profile. By interacting with this website even anons are agreeing to the concept of these terms, and therefore should be similarly accountable.

Because I like being productive rather than just whining about problems, here are some ideas off the top of my head that could aid creators in dealing with anon harrassment should sight programmers wish to do something about it:

1: allow us to set up a filter or rules that deal with comments. for example: let us write a simple regex expression that blocks comments that have a certain phrase or 'username' - especially since they already have an html environment for writing the summeries and such. For example, if I didn't want people cursing in my comment section, I could put something like ("Fuck") in a filter box and comments that contained that word would be suspended for my review rather than just appearing on my work. And if I wanted to ban 'usernames' that contain, for example, ("Lila") I could put them into a similar ban box and that username wouldn't be available for the trolls to use. This would allow a creator to premptively stop trolls by keeping a running list of troll 'usernames' in their ban list, and only need to add them when a new one crops up. This would probably need some hard work on the programers part, since there would be a lot of input sanatation required, but at the same time it could be a very powerful antiharassment tool, allowing people to stop slurs before they can be uttered on their works (and if the archive want to they could tell a commenter about to post such a comment that they should change their verbiage since 'the creater has restricted x words in your comment')

2:The aforementioned 'anon' account. This would link all comments by a single 'anon username' under a psudo-account. This would allow groups of trolls working under the same alius to be punished simultaneously. The 'anon account' is therefore a heavily stripped down version of the verified user accounts, only availible as an antiharassment tool to stop this type of abuse. I doubt this would actually happen but I think it is possible even if it isn't plausible.

3: Reinforcing the Spam button: This is simple, since they already connect an email to anon comments, block new comments on that work by that email if they are marked as spam. That is how a spam filter works on email, and that works quite well at straining out all the malious content, why not do similar here? Sure a troll can create a new email, but it would stop comment bombing like happened to me since creating a new email address for each new comment would quickly become tiresome for a troll (I hope). It may not stop a particularly dedicated troll, but it would help, and it would make the spam button better than a renamed delete button.

Keep in mind that these are just thoughts from the top of my head, I haven't put dedicated thought into this as I'm barely know my way around a linux command line and basic python. I would hope that those who are invested in this topic would come up with more ideas to talk about and discuss in the comments, but who knows at this point. The main reason for this 'story' was to put out the abuse report and the response to let the subcommunity know how the archive suggests we deal with the Lilanon. 

Whatever other solutions come, the main takeaway here is this:

DON'T ENGAGE, just delete the comments as they come or ignore them. 

Thanks for reading this, and please, do give your ideas below, I honestly would like to see them and who knows, maybe a site admin/programmer will read this and the comments and actually do something about it.

Have a good night/day everyone,

Sentlett


End file.
